4/29/09: "Sometimes what we wake up can't be put back to sleep."
("Fringe," Fox Television)
"Fringe" is the new X FILES, and it's outstanding: well-cast, well-written ... it sparkles and pops right off the screen. Well, off the laptop screen -- I watch it on-line, because I cut the cord to my television. I have enough temptations in my life without the Biography Channel or the History Channel beckoning alluringly. One of the things I love about good entertainment is how it is often more than just entertainment. A good book is a trip, a journey, an education, as much as it is a story. A fantastic movie is an escape or an allegory. And characters that are well-drawn, fully developed and realized, can be inspirations or crucibles. Their insights can become one's own.
I'm reminded of the myth of Pandora (Pandora @ Wiki) with the above quote: Pandora and her proverbial "box" or jar, releasing all of man's evils, except hope. At first blush, this seemed odd to me, that "hope" would be included in a bottle chock full of man's evils. But as I've grown older, I begin to see hope as an evil all its own. We humans will paint it with benevolence, but that's a whitewash, a palliative.
Hope, like many evils, can be both beneficial or harmful depending on the size of the dose. Yet it seems to me that Hope is malicious in a unique and caustic way. Only Hope can drive you for a lifetime. Hope, when it's blind, when it is unfounded in anything concrete, can appear to be as sustaining as the "rooted in truth" kind. They both can appear to be worthwhile. Yet hoping for the impossible is merely a slow path of destruction. And Hope rarely bothers to quantify the likelihood of success. We merely "hope," as if that will be sufficient.
I think about Pandora, and the the myth that portrays her as innocent, naive, unaware of the chaos she will unleash if she indulges just one little curious glimpse. (There's a deeper irony to me personally, as well, because Pandora's original story, as told by Hesiod, is more of a condemnation of women as a gender, and the folly of men in loving them.) Mostly Pandora's story calls me to in her own siren's way because she represents taking matters into her own hands. I imagine her cracking that jar's lid, and the contents rushing past her, tearing her hair, perhaps blinding her as that tempest escaped. Perhaps by instinct alone, she stoppers it ... just before the last thing in the jar slips away. Would she have been terror-stricken as she sat there, clutching the jar? Stunned? Ashamed? Was she exhilarated at first, at the power she didn't realize she'd held in her lap? How might she have ascertained that only Hope was left in her hands?
Hope is a klaxon for me. It rumbles up old dreams and ideas, and blows off dust and cobwebs, making the impossible seem possible. And sometimes ... that's true. But mostly, it isn't. Hope wakes things up in me, slumbering things that I imagine have merely grown in power, the longer they were locked away out of sight. Things that maybe were better off staying asleep.
